Posts in Category "Adobe Camera Raw and DNG"

The video below demonstrates the Radial Filter in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CC. Additional tips and shortcuts for working with the Radial Filter are below.

• Tap the “J” key to select the Radial Filter

• The Shift key will constrain the Radial Filter to a circle.

• Tapping the “V” key will toggle the overlay of the Radial Filter interface (bounding box).

• Tapping the “Y” key will toggle the overlay of the Radial Filter mask.

• While dragging one of the four handles of an existing Radial Filter to resize it, press the Shift key to preserve the aspect ratio of the ellipse.

• While dragging the boundary of an existing Radial Filter to rotate it, press the Shift key to snap the rotation to 15-degree increments.

• While dragging to create a new Radial Filter, press and hold the Space bar to move the ellipse; release the Space bar to resume defining the shape of the new Radial Filter.

• While dragging inside of an existing Radial Filter to move it, press the Shift key to constrain the movement to the horizontal or vertical direction.

• You can drag a Radial Filter beyond the image area.

• While an existing Radial Filter is selected, press the Delete key to delete the Radial Filter.

• Double-click in the image area to set the bounding box of the Radial filter to the image bounds.

• Double-click inside of an existing Radial Filter to expand the bounding box of the Radial Filter to the image bounds. Or, Control -click (Mac) | Right Mouse -click (Win) on the Radial Filter pin and select Fill Image to expand the Radial filter to the image bounds.

Often I have found that I want to apply perspective correction to multiple files at once using the Upright feature in Camera Raw. But depending on the results I want to achieve, it’s best to know that there are two different ways of accomplishing this. Note: For both methods, it is recommended that you first enable Lens Profile Corrections and Remove Chromatic Aberration using the Lens Corrections panel in Camera Raw.

METHOD ONE – in the first situation, you might have a series of unrelated images that all need to have their own set of perspective corrections made to them. In this case, the easiest way to apply Upright would be to:

• Select all of the desired files in Camera Raw. Then in the Lens Correction panel, in the Manual sub-panel (where the Upright controls are) click the desired Upright mode (Auto, Level, Vertical, or Full) in order to apply the perspective correction to all selected files.

Here all of the images are selected in the filmstrip, then the Upright mode is applied.

• With this method, each image is analyzed individually and the perspective corrected.

Note: if you prefer not to select all of the files first (or have additional settings in other panels that you want to synchronize to multiple selected images), you can select the first file and apply the desired changes including the Upright mode. Then, add the other images to your selection and click the Synchronize button. In the Synchronize dialog, check the settings you want, plus Transform. And, if you do this often, you may want to consider creating a preset to apply an Upright transformation mode.

METHOD TWO – in the second situation, you might have a series of related images – such as a sequence of bracketed exposures or a set of time lapse images for which you need the same exact numeric perspective corrections made to each image. In this scenario, you don’t want to run the upright analysis on each individual image because Upright is likely to return a slightly different result on each of the images in the selection. Instead, what you want to do is have the upright analysis be performed on one of the images, and then have the result of that analysis (the numeric transformation) synchronized across the other images in the set.

In order to do this, select the first image of the series (in this case one of several exposures necessary to create a single HDR image) and apply the desired Upright transformation option.

Apply the Upright transformation to the single selected image.

Then, add the additional images to your selection and, in the Lens Correction panel, in the Manual sub-panel, click the Sync Results hyperlink.

With all of the images in the series selected in the filmstrip, the Sync Results hyperlink becomes available..

With multiple images selected, Camera Raw will copy Upright’s numerical transformations from the primary image to the other selected images.

I’m pleased to announce that my book Window Seat – The Art of Digital Photography and Creative Thinking is now available as an eBook via the iTunes store! First published as a soft-back book, this redesigned and revised eBook was published as a Fixed Layout EPUB directly from the newest release of InDesign CC (2014). It has been enhanced with new photographs as well as updated image processing techniques in Adobe Bridge, Camera Raw and Photoshop.

Part manifesto, part artist’s portfolio and part technical manual, Window Seat, The Art of Digital Photography and Creative Thinking is guaranteed to awaken, delight, and inspire the creative spirit that lives in all of us.

Photographer, creativity guru and Adobe digital imaging evangelist, Julieanne Kost travels by plane 200+ days a year. For the past decade, she’s been shooting photographs from those airplane windows, recording the extraordinary world that lies beyond the everyday drudgery of business travel on a commercial jet.

She urges us to consider – and embrace – that which is outside of our daily experience. To see all that we do in our lives as creative acts. To continually strive to stay awake and aware, challenging ourselves to go beyond the status quo.

Today Adobe announced all new versions of 14 CC desktop applications, 4 new mobile apps, the immediate availability of creative hardware, and new offerings for Enterprise, education and photography customers.

Of course this includes new features, enhancements and updates to both Photoshop and Lightroom for design and photography including the new Spin and Path Blurs in Blur Gallery, new typographic controls including Font Search and Typekit integration, enhancements to Smart Objects, Smart Guides, and Layer Comps, improved Content-Aware technologies, new selection capabilities using Focus Mask, as well as hidden gems and workflow timesavers.

Check out the latest advancements in Photoshop CC in the videos below:

Photoshop CC (2014): New features and enhancements (3 minute overview)

How to Add Realistic Spinning Motion Blur Effects in Photoshop CC

Adding Motion Blur Effects Along a Path in Photoshop CC

New Typographic Features in Photoshop CC

How to Align and Distribute Layers using Smart Guides in Photoshop CC

How to Use Layer Comps for Multi State Mock-ups in Photoshop CC

New Smart Object Features in Photoshop CC

How to Remove Distracting Elements using the Enhanced Content Aware Tools in Photoshop CC

How to Use Focus Mask to Make Selections based on Focus in Photoshop CC

Since people often ask me when I convert my files to DNG, I will admit that I don’t convert until after I am finished editing the images (including rating, keywording and developing them). Why? Because, although I could convert on import, I throw away a fair amount of images in my editing process, and I figure that there’s no sense in wasting the time to convert files that I’m going to throw away.

Of course you don’t have to wait until the end of your workflow to convert your images, I just find it satisfying to convert as a final step. Plus, this way I know that any image that is a DNG has made it through my entire workflow.

As a direct result of your feedback, ACR 8.5 has a new button designed to display a per-panel preview that is applied directly to the main view of the image! Clicking this button will reset the settings in the selected panel to their defaults. Clicking it again will reset them to the previous settings. Or, you can use the shortcut Command + Option + P (Mac) | Control + Alt + P (Win) to toggle the preview.

Image with per-panel preview “Off” (modifications made to the HSL/Grayscale panel are visible in the image area).

Image with per-panel preview toggled “On” (the HSL/Grayscale panel is set to the default settings).

Although the preview behavior might appear to look the same as it did in previous versions, this new button actually works a bit differently “under the hood”. Instead of simply showing and hiding the settings in a panel, this button actually resets the panel (clicking the button again restores the previous settings).

So, you might be asking why did we change the per-panel preview behavior? Well, since Camera Raw is not a database program (like Lightroom is), it can’t keep track of different “states” that a panel might be in. This means that in previous versions of Camera Raw, if you had toggled off the preview state of a panel, and then clicked “Done” or “Open Image”, Camera Raw would apply the slider values—even if the preview was turned off for that panel. Therefore, what you saw in Camera Raw may not have matched the resulting file. As you can imagine, when this mismatch occurred, it was not only confusing to the customer, but also unacceptable to the engineering team.

With this release, I believe the engineers have provided us with the best of both worlds; we can still use the new Before/After features (those are completely unchanged), as well as have an improved per-panel preview as a standalone feature.

Adobe Camera Raw 8.5, has a fantastic new addition to the Graduated and Radial Filters – a brush to selectively hide the effects! This first illustration is the original image.

In the image below, a Graduated filter was added to darken the sky, however the effect is also applied to the top of the mountains because they are also affected by the Graduated filter.

To remove the effect in the top of the mountains, with the Gradient Filter selected, choose the Brush option. The Brush options include Size, Feather and Flow as well as Auto Mask (used to automatically detect edges based on contrast and color) and Clear (to remove Brush overrides).

This last image shows the result from using the Graduated Filter Brush to paint out the effect in the mountains while still retaining the effect in the sky area.

And one more super shortcut – to keep the Graduated and Radial filters eraser size the same as the brush, click the flyout menu (to the right of the Graduated Filter panel header), and toggle “Separate Eraser Size” from the menu.

As mentioned here, updates to Camera Raw 8 for Photoshop CS6 only include new camera support, lens profile support, and bug fixes. The new features listed in the release notes are only available in Photoshop CC.

While tapping the Q key will cycle through all of the Preview modes in Camera Raw in Photoshop, I primarily use the same view 95+% of the time. So that I don’t have to cycle through so many different options, I click-hold the Mode button to display the pop-up menu for Preview Preferences. Unchecking all but one of the Preview modes allows me to tap the “Q” key to quickly toggle my Before/After Left Right view on and off.

Click and hold on the Mode button to access the Preview Preferences and check your favorite view!

A number of people have been asking me to post the presets that I have showed when demonstrating Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. Although I don’t feel that they are earth shattering by any means, I do hope that they may prevent us all from individually recreating the wheel.

Note: If you are on a Mac, the Library menu may be hidden depending on your operating system. To reveal it, hold the Option key down while selecting the “Go” menu in the Finder.

There are presets for converting to grayscale using the B & W and HSL panels, toning using the Split Tone and Tone Curve panels, and adding grain and post crop vignetting using the Effects panel. The preset names differ slightly for each product as Camera Raw does not support folders in the Presets tab and I wanted similar presets grouped together. These presets are meant to be a starting point, you can customize any of them as you see fit, create your own, and delete the one’s that you don’t want to use.

Note: If you watch the sliders when applying these presets, you will see that each preset only moves the slider positions in a single panel. Therefore, if you click on one preset that changes sliders in the Tone Curve panel for example, and then click to apply a second preset that changes the sliders in the same panel, the second one will replace the first.

As some of you have pointed out, the shortcuts used to navigate through an open document in Photoshop (to make sure that you don’t miss any spots from sensor dust for example), are slightly different than when navigating through an open document in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom.

Tapping the Home and End keys in ACR and Lightroom take you to the top-left and bottom-right corners of the picture, respectively. These shortcuts are the same as Photoshop. Likewise, tapping the Page-down key takes you down 1 full screen: the same as Photoshop.

Unlike Photoshop, however, if you’re already at the bottom of the image in ACR or LIghtroom, tapping the Page-down key again takes you back to the top, and to the right by 1 full screen. So, if you start at the top-left of the picture, pressing page-down repeatedly will take you through your image, 1 screen at a time, till you’re at the bottom-right corner of the picture. Page-up does the same thing, but in the opposite direction.

In a nutshell, think of your picture like a book, with the top-left corner as the beginning, and the bottom-right corner as the end. Press Home to visit the beginning, then press Page Down till you get to the end. By doing so, you will see every single pixel of the image at least once.

Folks on the ACR and Lightroom team (myself included) think this variation is an improvement over Photoshop, because for those of us who need to do final inspection of their pictures (e.g., to make sure there aren’t any dust spots, etc.), it’s important to have an easy way to make sure we’ve seen every part of our pictures up close. With Photoshop, I have to remember where I am in the picture, because if I’m in the bottom-left corner of the picture, then tapping the Page Down key does nothing. In ACR and Lightroom, I have a guaranteed way to see all the pixels in the image, and Page Down/Page Up shortcuts allow me to continue navigating regardless of where I am in the picture.

You might not agree – which is absolutely fine, but now you know why the behavior is different between the programs. : )

Thank you Eric for helping me to explain this and for offering the book example above!

Join me today, Wednesday February 26th, from 9:00 am – 10:30 am on creativeLIVE for 90 minutes of “Advanced Photoshop Layer Tips” during Photoshop Week. Then, stay tuned because from 10:45 am – 12:15 pm, I’ll be covering all sorts of tips and techniques to help speed up your workflow “Automating Camera Raw” in Photoshop. The best news, is that all of the courses are free during the live broadcast! And, if you’re in a different time zone, the sessions will be rebroadcast. See the complete schedule and RSVP here.

As mentioned here, updates to Camera Raw 8 for Photoshop CS6 only include new camera support, lens profile support, and bug fixes. The new features listed here are only available in Photoshop CC.

Here’s an overview of my favorite features:

1) Previews – Camera Raw can now display a before/after Preview (with aside-by-side and split-view support) to compare your edits to the original. The Preview check box in earlier versions of ACR has been replaced by three buttons in the bottom-right of the ACR main dialog. From left to right, they are Mode, Swap and Copy:

Click the Mode button to cycle through left/right and top/bottom side-by-side and split-view modes.

• Click-and-hold the Mode button to bring up a popup menu for directly choosing Preview modes and accessing the Preview Preferences (the Preview Preferences support customizing the Preview modes used for cycling as well as some drawing options including divider and pane options).

Additional Notes: with regards to Previews: when making changes to images, the changes can only be made to the “after” image and the slider settings (in the panels) will always reflect the “after” image settings. The standard single-image view always shows the “after state”. Zooming and panning on one view will automatically zoom and pan the other.

2) Local correction changes – you can now easily reset all sliders when using the selective adjustment tools (Graduated and Radial filter and Adjustment Brush) by Control -clicking (Mac) | Right Mouse -clicking (Win) on the pin and choosing “Reset Local Correction Settings” from the context menu. Or, you can use the flyout menu to choose “Reset Local Correction Settings” – whichever is faster for you.

Previously, double clicking inside of a Radial Filter set it to fill the image bounds. This still works, however Control -click (Mac) | Right Mouse -click (Win) on the pin and choosing Fill Image accomplishes the same thing.

3) When synchronizing, creating new presets, saving settings (all in ACR) and copy and pasting settings (in Bridge), you can now single-click a button to check all/none.

4) Tap X when using the Crop Tool or Straighten Tool to flip the crop aspect ratio (landscape to portrait, portrait to landscape).

5) The Grain effect now varies from image to image to facilitate editing time-lapse and video frame sequences.

6) Control -click (Mac) | Right Mouse -click (Win) within the Histogram to enable Lab color readouts, even when the Workflow Options are set to another color space (such as Adobe RGB). Note: the context menu can also be used to toggle the shadow, highlight, and gamut clipping warnings.

8) The Red Eye tool can now correct bright pupils in animals. Select the tool and, in the Red Eye Removal panel, Select ‘Pet Eye’ from the drop down menu to locate and fix pet eyes. You can also automatically add catchlights and drag to reposition them.

“Join Julieanne Kost as she walks you through her creative thought process and explains how she transforms concepts and raw images into entirely new works of art using Adobe Photoshop. Discover how to select the images you need to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Master the tools used in compositing, including adjustment layers, masking, blending, and Smart Objects, so that the technology doesn’t get in the way of expressing your creative vision. Learn how to adjust scale and perspective and manipulate texture and focus to help viewers temporarily suspend their disbelief long enough to enter your world.”